She's talking about bees, or her roughly 60,000 colleagues in the Golden Hill backyard where we caught up with her.

It's just one of the homes where Kearney has setup a backyard beehive, or apiary, for a customer. She regularly checks on and maintains the apiaries, and over the past few years, business is booming for her business, Girl Next Door Honey.

Backyard Beekeeping Growing in San Diego

(Published Friday, Feb. 17, 2017)

She's also been stung more times than she can count.

In the county of San Diego, there are now 160 registered beekeepers, and more than 400 apiary locations. That's more than triple the number of locations from back in 2012, before the city and county changed rules making it easier to become a backyard beekeeper. Per regulations, apiaries have to be at least 15 feet from a property line.

"They're losing 40 percent of their bees every year," says Kearney. "One in every three bites of food that you eat is pollinated by a bee. And so, these beekeepers have to work really hard to keep their bees alive. They're losing money. This could drive up the cost of food."

In San Diego county, commercial bee keeping is a $4 million per year industry. And nationally, the USDA reports the value of honey at more than $315 million a year, and bees' impact on crop production at $14.6 billion a year.